DRAWING BIENNIAL 2016

Profiles of the world
Rimini
April 23-July 10, 2016

The second edition of Rimini's "Biennial of Drawing," staged from April 23 to July 10, 2016, transformed the Romagna resort into the capital of auteur drawing. Conceived by the Municipality of Rimini and the Municipal Museums, the Biennial invaded the historic center with as many as 2,000 works distributed in 29 exhibitions. This second edition, entitled "Profiles of the World," in fact involved the most attractive and well-known places in Rimini, from Castel Sismondo to Palazzo Gambalunga, from the Complesso degli Agostiniani to the City Museum. Thanks to partners such as the museum pole of Emilia Romagna and theInstitute for Cultural Heritage, "La Biennale del Disegno - Profili del mondo" has established itself as one of the most important exhibitions in the country, receiving prestigious loans from all over the region and from private collectors.

Characterized by the juxtapositions of classical and contemporary design, the "diffuse exhibitions" offer a thematic itinerary capable of ranging from Tiepolo, Guercino and Guido Reni to Mario Sironi, Schifano and Pericoli to Andrea Pazienza. Massimo Pulini, Rimini Councillor for Culture: "The 9 venues hosting these 29 exhibitions are identity places, cultural epicenters of our city. These venues will give visitors back the ideal embrace of the city." Giorgio Baratti Antiquario participated in the important event with the loan of the Martyrdom of St. Agatha by Cesare Pronti and To Eugene Berman by Saul Steinberg. Most importantly, with the exhibition of the gallery of portraits and the collection of caricatures of the Cenacolo Belgioioso, depicting members of the Artists and Patriotic Society.

Saul Steinberg (Râmnicu Sārat 1914 - New York 1999): "To Eugene Berman"

BELGIUM CENACLE

Milanese portraits and caricatures of the Risorgimento
Galli Theater - Cavour Square
April 23-July 10, 2016

From the presentation by Massimo Pulini, Councillor for Culture of Rimini: Palazzo Belgioioso, in Milan and in the Risorgimento season, housed a coterie of artists who, by their own statute added to the walls, the portrait of each new member of the patriotic circle. Artists who portrayed other artists therefore, who acted as noble mirrors to posing friends. The poise, the thoughtful expression, the cut of the hair, the care of the mustache or beard, the starched collar, and the vividness of the pupils, make these faces a distillation of individual characters, but on the whole an acute and timely repertoire of the moral and political sense of several generations of Italians.

This series of sharp and serene faces, caught in the weekday dimension of an evening spent in discussion, with a glass at hand and the cigar perhaps waiting for them smoking in the ashtray, in my eyes mean much more than the crammed paintings from the historical theme, interpreting episodes of the national Risorgimento, unfolding in image the civil and political rhetoric of the time. With an extraordinary synthesis of expression, captured in the sobriety of a single instrument of investigation consisting of a black pencil, white chalk for the points of maximum light, with the simple support of a sheet of pastel-colored paper, and with the profusion of a careful and measured gaze, the elegant discipline of these Lombard portraits unfolds.

An elegance that from the intellectual aristocracy declines toward the connotations of the incipient bourgeois world, almost seamlessly. All this, thanks to the quantity of faces portrayed, takes on something filmic, as a whole. A kind of documentary is formed that sequences the physiognomies and thoughts, attitudes and temperament of a host of painters and sculptors who marked the taste and customs of a cultural and political capital in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Biennial of Drawing 2016 - Cenacolo Belgioioso

THE PORTRAITS AND CARICATURES OF THE BELGIUM CENACLE

To mark the occasion, the two exhibition catalogs were published by Edizioni Medusa and edited by Fernando Mazzocca: the first dedicated to the gallery of portraits, the second to the collection of caricatures.

Cenacolo Belgioioso - The Portraits

An extraordinary gallery of as many as 150 portraits, which miraculously survived in its entirety thanks to a providential intervention of protection and the sensitivity of its current owner, Giorgio Baratti, to the dispersion of the artistic heritage of the Society of Artists and Patriotic, represents a fundamental testimony not only to reconstruct the artistic physiognomy, but also the face, through the image of the protagonists of Italian cultural life, of Milan from the second half of the 19th century until beyond World War II.

A collection of paintings, statues, prints and art books that "was gradually enriched by an uninterrupted production of portraits of members, born without directive, without choice of persons to be portrayed, without regard to merits of name and seniority, so that next to portraits of supreme masters we find some unknown names, next to painters and sculptors of fame some pale amateurs," as art historian Fernando Mazzocca writes in the volume. These portraits, almost all of them unpublished, give us back, with impressive truth, the memory of some protagonists of the time, such as Domenico Induno, Giuseppe Bertini, Eleuterio Pagliano, Sebastiano De Albertis, Federico Faruffini, Angelo Morbelli, Achille Beltrame, and Giuseppe Palanti.

A grandiose and almost epic "the way we were" emerges and is delineated through the proud features of these self-conscious faces, of a virile beauty that always also refers back to a strong inner dimension, to a tension that must have been that of those men committed to creating, also through art and culture, a better society.

Cenacolo Belgioioso - The caricatures

In addition to the magnificent gallery of portraits, presented in the other volume, another graphic series has survived the dispersion of the rich artistic heritage of the Society of Artists and Patriots that remains an important testimony to the artistic and social history of united Italy. This collection of caricatures assumes a testimony to the mundane dimension prevalent in the late nineteenth century and the first lights of the twentieth century.

In most cases it is the painters themselves who go from the serious to the ironic and, after portraying themselves in official, composed and sometimes smug poses, enjoy mocking each other. Palanti, Morelli, Martinenghi, Mossa or Bettinelli engage, with panache and sincerity, in the goliardic ritual of caricature.

Others or their loyal models come at the expense, being turned into a speck, seeing themselves reduced to a geometric shape or ending up in the deforming lens of the fastest and most sarcastic hands in the Italian art universe. The certainly most significant section is that of "Our Models." This is a stunning and amusing parade of faces of women mostly ahead of their age, each fixed in features that are now mestizo now frankly comic, but with surprising invention each time.

Online press review

- The Rimini Biennale of Drawing (Panorama.co.uk)
- Cenacolo Belgioioso. Milanese portraits and caricatures of the Risorgimento (Biennaledisegnorimini.it)
- The Biennale of Drawing is back in Rimini (Ilrestodelcarlino.it)
- RIMINI: Drawing Biennial Opens. Two thousand works in 27 exhibitions (Pubblisole)